Actor and director Emilio Estevez reluctantly went to Spain to tell a story about how faith, hope and walking are all part of the American way of overcoming hard times.

Estevez told The Catholic Register his new film The Way is about American spirituality. The story follows four characters walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela through Spain.

The pilgrimage is to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galacia, where tradition has it the remains of the apostle St. James are buried.

TORONTO - Aisha Aberdeen wasn’t born on third base, and she doesn’t imagine she hit a triple. But as the school year starts, the former foster child is ready to trot home.

Aberdeen has done what almost no kid who has been through foster care ever does. She’s graduated from the University of Toronto with a double major in forest conservation and Caribbean studies. Now she’s planning graduate studies in the forests of Kenya this year.

Fewer than 44 per cent of children who wind up in foster care complete high school before they’re 21. Only 20 per cent of those (8.8 per cent of the total) go on to any form of post-secondary education.  

Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan is about to unleash a new dimension in a spiritual crisis that already grips nearly 80,000 problem gamblers in Ontario, addiction counsellors say.

Duncan announced in August that the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation will be “extending its brand” into the Internet. By 2012 the province will deal poker, sell lottery tickets and run bingo games online. The province worries its citizens already spend $400 million a year on unregulated, off-shore gambling sites. It expects the provincial take from OLG-run web sites will be in the neighbourhood of $100 million. Charities may be given the opportunity to fundraise directly by running online bingo games.

But the toll in addiction will be high, particularly for young males most at risk for Internet gambling addictions, said Christiana Ashabo, Southdown Institute’s addiction and relapse prevention therapist.

It’s been 13 years since Mother Teresa died of a heart attack at age 87 on Sept. 5, 1997 in Calcutta. Aug. 26 marks her 100th birthday.

How well I remember those days . . . my own father died on Aug. 27 that year. One week later, Mother Teresa was called home to God. I provided commentary of her funeral for several networks in Canada. The pomp, precision and sombre majesty of Princess Diana’s London farewell one week earlier were hardly visible in the turbulent scenes of Mother Teresa’s simple wooden casket riding on a gun carriage through the streets of Calcutta for her state funeral.

Mother Teresa’s life was not a sound byte, but rather a metaphor for selfless devotion and holiness. Her most famous work began in 1950 with the opening of the first Nirmal Hriday (Tender Heart) home for the dying and destitute in Calcutta. Her words remain inscribed on the walls of that home: “Nowadays the most horrible disease is not leprosy or tuberculosis. It is the feeling to be undesirable, rejected, abandoned by all.”

Canada is not like Calcutta. Mother Teresa was not like most Canadians. But somehow the life of the tiny Albanian nun who ministered to the abandoned, the forgotten and the dying in Calcutta speaks to Canadians.

August 26 is the centenary anniversary of the birth of Blessed Mother Teresa and events are taking place worldwide to honour the occasion.

At a July showing of relics of Mother Teresa at St. Barnabus parish in Toronto, Sr. Mary Frank of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity saw people standing in line with tears in their eyes.

A new Internet domain exclusively for pornography was approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers in June.

Although some proponents of the domain say this will make it easier for people to block pornographic content, critics say that unless regulations make the .xxx domain a requirement,  explicit content online will grow since people won’t be required to shut down porn sites on other domains.

On June 24, 1610 Mi’kmaq Grand Chief Henri Membertou, hoping to solidify relations with Nova Scotia French settlers, became the first native Canadian baptized into the Catholic Church. He was joined that day by 20 family members and within 50 years the entire Mi’kmaq nation had become Christians.

The 400th anniversary of that historic baptism was celebrated in a public showcase June 24-28 that paid homage to Mi’kmaq culture and the important contribution made by Membertou and the Mi’kmaq nation to the spread of Catholicism in Canada. To this day, virtually every Mi’kmaq is a baptized Christian.

TORONTO - Couples planning to marry shouldn’t look at marriage preparation courses as a place to “grease their wheels” but rather a time to discern if they’re actually ready, experts say.

Clint Tyler, director of the marriage preparation and family life office at the archdiocese of Toronto, said its multi-week course is much more than a “happy weekend where couples can feel good,” but a real chance to discuss important issues that many couples don’t address on their own.

“It’s about having them explore if they are ready to commit to a Catholic vision of marriage,” Tyler said. “It’s our job to present that vision of Catholic marriage.”

About 20 per cent of couples who take the archdiocesan marriage prep course decide not to go ahead with a wedding, Tyler said, adding it’s better that they realize ahead of time if they have the same vision for their marriage and understand that it’s not just a commitment but a covenant.

On an evangelical television program some time ago, a married couple who had remarried after being divorced for five years shared their story. While I really enjoyed it, one thing the woman said really bugged me.

Their marriage had failed because she had an affair (or two), didn’t show any remorse and was caught repeatedly lying. When she was asked about her faith journey she said: “I was raised a Catholic, and as Catholics we are not taught that Jesus Christ wants to have a personal relationship with us. It wasn’t until I started having a personal relationship with Jesus (as taught to her by evangelicals) that I started to realize that Jesus cared about me and what I did and thought personally.”

My initial response to that comment was anger, then a question popped into my head. The woman was blaming the Catholic Church for not teaching her to have a personal relationship with Jesus, but why was she not sharing the blame with her parents? Whose duty is it to teach our children the importance of having a  relationship with Jesus? More than one pope has said parents are the primary educators of children and have a responsibility to pass down the precepts of the faith.